Tuesday

The Standard Model is a theory of fundamental particles and how they interact. It is very successful and its predictions are in very good agreement with almost all experimental measurements performed so far. The Standard Model includes 12 elementary particles that form all the visible matter in the universe, gauge bosons that mediate three out of four fundamental forces: strong, weak and electromagnetic, and the Higgs boson. The Higgs boson was the last missing particle predicted by the Standard Model to be discovered in 2012.

Although the Standard Model is very successful theory it does leave some phenomena unexplained and it falls short of being a complete theory of fundamental interactions. The model for example does not contain any viable explanation for the dark matter that accounts for most of the matter in the universe. It also does not incorporate neutrino oscillations (and their non-zero masses).

The second day at the conference will start with the review of the latest results on Higgs boson’s properties and how well they agree with the Standard Model expectations. The remaining of the morning session will be devoted to the electro-weak measurements, such as masses of the weak bosons W and Z, and of the most massive quark, performed at the Large Hadron Collider. All of these quantities are interconnected in the Standard Model and their agreement can be tested by the so called global fit to all existing measurements. Any inconsistency in the fit could point to physics beyond the Standard Model.

After the coffee break the latest results in neutrino physics will be presented. Neutrinos do not carry any electric nor colour charge, which means that they are not affected by the electromagnetic nor the strong forces. Neutrinos are therefore affected only by the weak force and by gravity, which makes them very difficult to detect. In order to detect them physicists build large and massive detectors (Detector Super Kamiokande consists for example of 50,000 tons of ultra-pure water). On the other hand, the neutrinos are omnipresent in nature, produced by reactions ongoing in the Sun, nuclear reactors on earth, or in the reactions of cosmic rays in the earth’s atmosphere, such that in just one second, tens of billions of them pass through every square centimetre of our bodies without us ever noticing. Experimentalist study the neutrinos produced by all of these sources and the most recent results will be reviewed.

The majority of the afternoon will be devoted to the quantum chromo dynamics, a part of the Standard Model describing the strongest of the fundamental forces. The strong interaction affects all reactions studied at the Large Hadron Collider and needs to be understood to high precision experimentally as well as theoretically. This is essential to perform precise measurements of properties of particles and their interactions within the Standard Model as well as within models going beyond it. One of the talks on this subject will be given by the 2015 Young Experimental Physicist Prize recipient – Jan Fiete Grosse-Oetringhaus.